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@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Peter Thiel on the best idea he had for managing people and why: "The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view."
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Jeff Bezos used a similar idea at Amazon called “Single threaded leadership” Both ideas are mentioned in the latest episode: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/founders/id1141877104?i=1000628642785 Spotify: https://spotify.link/8vVHMrrInDb
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
A lesson Nassim Taleb learned from Ed Thorp: Own your life. Don't give up control for more money. "Some additional wisdom I personally learned from Thorp: Many successful speculators, after their first break in life, get involved in large-scale structures, with multiple offices, morning meetings, coffee, corporate intrigues, building more wealth while losing control of their lives. Not Ed. After the separation from his partners and the closing of his firm he did not start a new mega-fund. He limited his involvement in managing other people’s money. Such restraint requires some intuition, some self-knowledge. It is vastly less stressful to be independent—and one is never independent when involved in a large structure with powerful clients. It is hard enough to deal with the intricacies of probabilities, you need to avoid the vagaries of exposure to human moods. True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one’s activities for peace of mind. Thorp certainly learned a lesson. *You can detect that the man is in control of his life.* This explains why he looked younger the second time I saw him, in 2016, than he did the first time, in 2005.” - - - - And he still looks great. He’s 85 in this picture:
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Charlie Munger on Warren Buffett’s intense focus: “Buffett’s decision to limit his activities to a few kinds and to maximize his attention to them, and to keep doing so for 50 years, was a lollapalooza. Buffett succeeded for the same reason Roger Federer became good at tennis. Buffett was, in effect, using the winning method of the famous basketball coach, John Wooden, who won most regularly after he had learned to assign virtually all playing time to his seven best players. That way, opponents always faced his best players, instead of his second best. And, with the extra playing time, the best players improved more than was normal. And Buffett much out-Woodened Wooden, because in his case the exercise of skill was concentrated in one person, not seven, and his skill improved and improved as he got older and older during 50 years, instead of deteriorating like the skill of a basketball player does.”
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
This podcast is full of advice and lessons from Warren and Charlie It’s like they’re speaking directly to you for an hour: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/founders/id1141877104?i=1000594560720 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3j0nU1hztrJ1lQ8pKElGZy?si=_-Wg27NKQtOATBreLXOIsw
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Steve Jobs: Asking for help is a superpower “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett (founder of HP) when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I asked if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed. He gave me the parts. And he gave me a summer job at HP working on the assembly line putting together frequency counters. I have never found anyone who said no, or hung up the phone. I just ask. Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things, versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act.”
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
What a young Arnold Schwarzenegger was like: 1. He had no time to waste on naysayers. 2. He aligned only with those who shared his passion. 3. He made bodybuilding his existence. He ate it, slept it, worked it, imagined it, thought it, believed it, and trusted it. 4. He mastered his goals like a wizard. 5. He was not a man of many surprises. He was clear in his focus, firm in his decisions, and egocentric at all costs. 6. He combined singular concentration and a rock solid belief in his potential. 7. He saw clearly what he could achieve and that gave him a tremendous amount of motivation. 8. He would train twice a day. Sometimes three times a day. Sometimes four times a day. 9. He would go home during lunch and do sit-ups for an hour straight —just to be ahead of everyone else. 10. He always felt self-confident, no matter the disparity in sophistication, income or status. 11. He maintained his rigorous training schedule. 12. He craved the interaction with each new expert and remembered every tip. 13. He believed he had the ability to learn any content he chose. 14. He'd developed an obsessive desire for public acclaim. 15. He would constantly say: “This is just the next step. You haven't seen anything yet.” 16. He centered his life around the gym. 17. He focused on the next rep only. If a training partner said, "I wish we didn't have five more sets to do.” Arnold would reply, "We just have the one rep we're on. Do it!” 18. He stalked through life with impeccable discipline. 19. He was the director of his life. 20. He had unrestrained mutinous energy. 21. He acquired the bulk of his information from listening. 22. He admired anyone who could contribute verbal knowledge into his mental storage tank. 23. He was always observant. 24. He grew more refined everyday. 25. He was an unbranded animal. 26. He did not like stooping down to an old image he'd shed. 27. He always spun for the positive. 28. He navigated through each medium with remarkable dexterity. 29. He was never satisfied. 30. He was the most goal-oriented man you ever met. 31. He was masterful in plotting the necessary actions to carry out greater feats. 32. He had a Ph.D. in Charisma. 33. He preferred spending time with those who could benefit his career. 34. He always sought those with brains worth examining. 35. He would always convey uniqueness.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
1. When he was in his early 20s Arnold’s lived with his girlfriend for 6 years 2. She wrote a book about what that was like 3. These are my notes from her book 4. Arnold was inevitable — no one was going to stop him 5. I made a podcast about this https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/founders/id1141877104?i=1000618380933
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Numbers 21, 22, and 23 remind me of Rockefeller A highlight from his biography Titan: "He listened closely to what people said and filed away as much information as he could, repeating valuable information to himself until it was memorized. There was humility in this eagerness to learn. As he said, "It is very important to remember what other people tell you, not so much what you yourself already know.””
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Right before he died, Steve Jobs reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be. A thread on the lessons he wanted to pass on:
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON PUTTING GREAT PRODUCTS FIRST: My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON INSTINCTS OVER MARKET RESEARCH: Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON COMBINING IDEAS FROM DIFFERENT FIELDS: Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the 70s computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci & Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON BEING INTEGRATED: People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated,
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON THE MISTAKE OF PRIORITIZING SALES OVER PRODUCT: I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
didn’t know anything about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON BUILDING A REAL COMPANY: I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company,
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON BEING HONEST: I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying “Ron, that store looks like shit
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON KEEPING THE TEAM EXCELLENT: I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when Reed was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON ALWAYS MOVING: You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought out what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
“Like a Rolling Stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says, “Play it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do—keep moving.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
ON TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE WORK THAT CAME BEFORE YOU: What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
That’s what has driven me.
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Steve Jobs on money: “I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn't have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life."
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Learn more from Steve Jobs by listening to these episodes: #178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Products #214 Steve Jobs: The Biography #265 Becoming Steve Jobs #299 Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Word https://pod.link/founders
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
Incredible that the @SJArchive made this book available for free Almost 300 pages of Steve Jobs in his own words: https://stevejobsarchive.com/book
@FoundersPodcast - David Senra
He’s speaking about his personal motivation He said multiple times that profits are important because profits are what allows you to make the product His primary motivation was excellence —not being the richest person in the cemetery Steve in his own words: "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings."